Cloudera Plans Data Hub Role For Hadoop

Cloudera prepares to make Hadoop a central hub and first destination for companies' data. SAS and Apache Spark add data-analysis options.

The nub of the big news from Cloudera at this week's Strata/Hadoop World event in New York is the beta release of Cloudera Enterprise 5, the latest version of the vendor's Hadoop platform.

The bigger picture is what Cloudera calls the Enterprise Data Hub, which is how the company says Hadoop is now being used by advanced practitioners and how it will be used by most customers within a few years.

"We've moved from batch storage [and processing] at scale to batch plus real-time analytics and real-time access to data with security, access control and audit logging capabilities," said Mike Olson, Cloudera's chief strategy officer, in an interview with InformationWeek. "That has a growing number of our customers deploying Hadoop at the center of their data centers as the first place data goes when it enters the enterprise, rather than at the side of the data center to solve a few, ancillary problems."

The vision sounds reminiscent of Olson's assertion earlier this year that "the center of gravity is shifting"away from data warehousing and toward Hadoop. But the Enterprise Data Hub is a more holistic view of how Cloudera's platform fits in an even broader view of data management.

"With an Enterprise Data Hub, information is cheap to store, and you can keep full-fidelity [unaggregated] data forever if you want to," Olson explained. "You can do your ETL and your data cleaning and preening on this new platform and deliver derived data sets to special-purpose data warehouses and document management systems for advanced processing there."

The idea is to keep the broadest and deepest swath of data on Hadoop -- or more correctly, Cloudera's commercially enhanced version of Hadoop -- and use Cloudera Impala SQL capabilities, Cloudera Search, and Cloudera Navigator access management and auditing to take over the broad and high-scale workloads from traditional database systems such as data integration, data warehouse and document management systems.

The Enterprise Data Hub vision will bring changes to Cloudera's product packaging and product pricing. The details have yet to be spelled out, but if the Enterprise Data Hub is to live up to its name, Olson said it has to meet enterprise-grade expectations for security, encryption, access control, logging, data lineage and more. That's where many of Cloudera's commercial options and components come in.

In the current packaging regime, Cloudera Enterprise 4 bundles open source CDH (Cloudera's distribution including Apache Hadoop) and Cloudera Manager (the vendor's commercial deployment, management and monitoring software) with commercial support. Anything beyond that was optional, including support and management capabilities for Apache HBase, Cloudera Impala, Cloudera Search, and advanced backup and disaster recovery.

When Cloudera Enterprise 5 becomes generally available early next year, Olson said we can expect an Enterprise Data Hub offering that will roll all of those a la carte options into one, comprehensive offering.